I began this project with the simple idea of making some photographs that had the look and feel of plein air paintings. Two years later this project has literally changed the way I see the landscape when I'm out for a drive. In this project I photograph while riding as a passenger in a car traveling 50 mph. As I look out of the side window of the car, I pan the camera in the opposite direction to the direction the car is traveling. Initially, most images were as expected but soon I began to capture images that contained unusual circular motion. I did not know the origins of this motion, understand it, or see it myself. These photographs made visible motion swirling in fields and around trees. It created concentric circles around a vortex that was the point where I was focusing the camera. The movement of the circles closer to the focal point was faster. Very curious.It took nearly a year of photographing before I began to see with my own eyes the motion that I was photographing and nearly another year before I was able to establish the nature of this motion.What I found was that if you are traveling in a certain direction and you look out at roughly 90 degrees to the direction you are moving and focus on a point that is not infinity, all objects between you and the focus point pass in a direction opposite to the direction you are traveling. But if you look beyond the focus point you find that all those objects are traveling in the same direction as you are moving. It turns out that everything, all the dirt and bushes, circulate around a focus point. The circulation is counter clockwise on the right and clockwise on the left. The reason most people including me have not seen the circular motion before is that we normally focus on the horizon so that we never see what is on the other side of the focus point. Though I can see this circular motion, I quickly found that the camera can see so much more than I can. I find it difficult to see this motion in a field that contains unplanted rows or if there are objects like fences or buildings that interrupt the space. The camera has no such impediments. It is not affected by these visual obstacles. I see this motion best when looking at a lightly textured field, like a tomato field when the plants are only a few inches high. I have great difficulty seeing it in more three dimensional spaces like a grove of trees. Again, the camera does not have these limitations. In addition, the camera can add time as a variable where objects in the photograph move through space over time at different velocities.The photographs I am showing here are from this exploration. I had started by photographing something I could neither see nor explain, and I ended up resolving both issues. Along the way I uncovered a visual world I never knew existed. The camera was both leading me and teaching me. These photographs show different aspects, some subtle, some more pronounced, of the circular motion and the way it has changed the way I see that has been my interest.

The black arrows below show the direction of objects as viewed when traveling down the road as the focus point changes relative to the observer.

When the focus point (focal point) is at the horizon (infinity), all objects appear to pass by the car in the opposite direction.

When the focus point (focal point) is moved towards the car, objects beyond the focal point appear to move in the same direction as the car while objects between the focal point and the car continue to movein the opposite direction. The movement of objects connect to form observable concentric circles emmanating from the focal point.